


Till Human Voices Wake Us

by Smaragdina



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-17
Updated: 2012-10-17
Packaged: 2017-11-16 12:18:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/539345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smaragdina/pseuds/Smaragdina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The lights of the city that she loves more than her own life are bright and blue in the distance. Dawn is breaking, the sky beginning to fire with pale gold, and Jessamine arcs toward him like the drawing of a bow as he presses each 'please' against her skin." They share a moment on the morning of Corvo's departure when no one is around to see. (Now with art!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Till Human Voices Wake Us

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to kiwiitin on Tumblr for her fantastic art of this fic! See it [here](http://kiwiitin.tumblr.com/post/34051453419/and-then-a-bit-of-giftart-for-ladysmaragdina-for).

_We have lingered in the chambers of the sea_

_By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown_

_Till human voices wake us, and we drown_

\- T.S. Eliot

 

 

Dunwall Tower is all abed, and this is how it should be. The stars are still pale in the sky. The edge of the sea is beginning to set itself alight with a fragile line of gold, the very beginning of dawn, and Corvo stands in the window and watches it lighten by breaths. Watches the sea and the horizon and the things past it he cannot see.

He should not be awake.

Or if he is awake he should be dressed and polished and patrolling the courtyard, twitching curtains, peering at shadows, nervous, _nervous_ –

It is dawn, he reminds himself. The tower is asleep. The guards are good. The gates are locked. The Empress and her daughter are surrounded by men that she trusts, even if he does not, and that will have to be good enough. It will all have to be good enough.

(He should _not_ be awake and searching the horizon for the sails of a ship come to bear him far away - )

It will _have_ to be good enough.

He rubs a hand over his face, feeling the unshaven skin; and even that little gesture is nervous, too, and the sky is growing ever lighter. He hears the door open behind him but does not turn. There is only one person in the tower who would open it without knocking and in any case he knows her scent, the sound of her breath, the way the air shifts when she enters the room. He knows it far, far too well.

“You shouldn’t be up this early,” he tells her.

“I knew you wouldn’t sleep.”

Still, Corvo does not turn, and Jessamine takes a breath that is loud enough for him to hear and steps forward. He can see her out of the corner of his eye, barely, just a blur of loose dark hair and a green dressing gown and pale skin – like him, she has just risen from bed, half-dressed and shadowed – and he does not turn. Does not _dare_ turn. Even when she lays a hand upon his shoulder. “I know that you don’t like this –”

“I _shouldn’t_ – ” The sound is ugly and he breaks off, jaw working, eyes down. Gains control of his voice again. “I shouldn’t leave your side,” he says. “Send someone else. A proper diplomat. Someone on Parliament will jump at the chance. Anyone.”

It is the hundredth time he has asked. They have danced this same dance so many times, but he cannot help himself, even though he knows what she will say by heart.

And she does. “I trust you.”

“That’s exactly why –”

“Corvo,” she says (and the sound of his name is enough to break him a little, as always), “who else can I trust?” She touches him on the side of the face and turns him to her. It is almost against his will because they know he cannot deny her anything when she is like this, hair unbound, the masks they wear by full daylight not yet donned. “Who better a man to guard the life of the city than the man who guards my own?” Her lips quirk sideways. “And if you say that my life is more important than the city –”

He does not need to say it, she can read it in the smile that flits around his mouth, and she pulls back with a faint laugh. “And _that_ ,” she says, “is why you are not Empress.”

“I’d look a fool in your clothes, anyway.”

“And I’d look a fool in yours?” she asks, teasing. Steps lightfooted around him. The rest of his clothes are laid out by the bed, crisply folded, all the trappings of the Lord Protector. His sword leans against the chest, polished, gleaming. Jessamine takes his coat and swirls it around her, sweeping her hair away from the collar. “Well?”

“You look –” The cloth is heavy and dark on her and only the tips of her fingernails poke out of the overlarge sleeves, and she is tall and lovely and blazing. She is an Empress; she can wear anything. He considers. “Very silly,” he finishes.

“Silly?”

“And very beautiful.” The smile dies on Corvo’s face. “I’m being serious.”

“I know you are.” She draws the coat around. Warmth or comfort or both; it does not matter. “Emily was inconsolable last night,” she says softly. Eyes down, hair slipping past the collar to shadow her face. “She can’t accept that you’re leaving. We’ve had this talk before, I told her it’d only be a few months, but…she locked the door to her room –”

(As if he hadn’t heard the yelling; as if he hadn’t slipped out the window and up to the balcony an hour later and found Emily curled up around a doll by the fireplace, fast asleep. As if he hadn’t carried her to bed, tucked her in, wiped the half-dried tears off her cheeks, smoothed her wild hair).

Jessamine takes a sharp breath. Straightens. Corvo can see the mask of the Empress fall into place, just a little, and his heart clenches with half-imagined pain. “Where are you going first?” she asks, as if she has not planned the entire trip herself; as if she has not gone over it Emily day by day by day with a map of the Isles spread before them and her hands folded over her daughter’s own.

(And she sounds businesslike and forced and he does not _want_ to wear the role of Lord Protector for her, now, not with the tower so quiet and unwatchful around them, but if this is what she needs -)

“Serkonos,” he says. Calm and easy. “Bastillian first, three days to Cullerno…”

Her lips twitch. “You’re going home, then.”

“No.”

Her eyes are down and her shoulders are tight and she does not look at him.

“Jessamine,” he manages, hoping at last that her name will unman her as his own does him, “please.”

“I can’t. Corvo, I _can’t_. I _need_ someone to go and save this city and you’re the only one that I trust –”

He feels her shudder almost before he sees it, feels the mask of _Empress_ fall and crack and shatter on the floor and he steps forward and holds her by the narrow shoulders that are narrower still under the weight of his coat. “You’re the _only_ one I can trust –“ she repeats – and it is barely a whisper and he covers her lips with his before the pain can break her voice, takes the words in his own mouth before anyone else can hear.

It amazes him, as always, what it is to kiss her.  She is like a candleflame. Bright and shivering and blazing.

And her hand is cupped against the back of his neck like _this_ , and the words she speaks are little bursts of heat that pepper his skin. “I came,” she manages, “to say goodbye –”

“They’ll be a ceremony later. Aristocrats whispering behind their hands and everything. You can say it then.”

“Properly.” She gasps when his lips find the curve of her jaw, the line of her pulse down her neck. “ _Properly_.”

“You should send one of those aristocrats instead of me.”

“Corvo.”

“It’s not too late.”

_“Corvo.”_

She’s walked them back until they are standing against the frame of the window, her back against the corner of white stone and he is grateful, at least, that she is wearing his coat, because the thin cloth of her dressing gown is nothing to _protect_ her from the morning chill. He slips his hands around her waist and up past her shoulderblades to feel out the ties and begin undoing them, kissing the skin of her neck, watching the sea spread out below them. The lights of the city that she loves more than her own life are bright and blue in the distance. Dawn is breaking, the sky beginning to fire with pale gold, and Jessamine arcs toward him like the drawing of a bow as he presses each _please_ against her skin. “Let me stay,” he breathes. “Send someone else. Anyone. Please. Let me stay.”

“Stop it. _Stop_.” He feels her shudder with every breath, and the sky is so light and they have so little time, so very little time. Her hands curl into his hair as she drags his mouth back to his for a kiss that is brief and almost painful in its desperation. “I am your _Empress_ and I command you to stop –”

The dressing gown slides between them like water and Corvo steps away. With ease of practice, he falls to his knees. “Empress,” he agrees.

The startled sound of her breathing is loud as music on the morning air.

Corvo wets his lips. His head is bowed in supplication and his eyes are on the dressing gown puddled on the bare stone floor. If he looks up, he knows, he will see her all in glory, his coat like a cape around her, the dawn light limming her in pale fire. He will not be able to speak. He offers her the back of his neck and her hand fits there, perfectly, blazing as a brand.

“Stop this,” Jessamine breathes.

“Command me.”

She says nothing. He kisses the curve of her calf, slides his hand up to cup the back of her right knee. The bones there are delicate and breakable as the bones of a bird. Her muscles twitch under his touch. He follows the path of his hands with his lips. The coat-hem brushes light on the side of his face and he cannot help but wonder how her skin here is so pale, how no one sees her like this, she is so strong and unmarred by scar, and the touch of her hand on the nape of his neck is barely a whisper and undeniable as an anchor-chain pulling him up from the deep.

He traces the blue line of a vein up the inside of her leg. It is a vulnerable place. If she were cut here the blood would spill forth like a river.

“We’re in the window,” she manages at last, “someone could –”

 _Someone could hurt you,_ he thinks. He presses his mouth to the racing pulse-point of that vein as if he can ward her against it, but what he says instead is “so command me to stop.”

He feels her sharp intake of breath as if it is a solid thing.

He does not deny her when her hands curl fast in his hair and she draws him upwards to her. He does not deny her anything.

She is his Empress and so she is right, of course, and anyone could look in the window and see them like this – see _her_ , the blue and gold of his coat brushed with the fall of her dark hair – and that lends him urgency, attentiveness, purpose. His hand is cupped against the back of her knee, fingers stroking her skin, and her own fingers are curled white against the sill. Her cries break upon the morning air and she moves a hand to muffle them as her body works against his mouth, hips surging like the sea, and he thinks of seas and the taste of salt and tides that return home. He will return home. He must. Better never to leave at all. He thinks of waves curling over toward where they began and he kisses at her, careful, suckles at her as if she is the air and he is already drowning.

 _Please,_ he breathes.

But she cannot hear it as she shudders and shatters and comes apart.

Corvo rises from his knees and pulls her away from the rising brilliant light at the window, pulls her into his arms. He holds the _please_ on his tongue along with the taste of her and the taste of the sea and the distance and desire. But Jessamine can see it, of course she can see it, there are no masks between them, and she shakes her head.

And so for a long time they do not speak at all.                                          

If the tide is to carry him away from her, he decides, it must also carry him back. That is the way of things. Whether they wear the masks of their titles or no it is forever his place to be at her side and so he _will_ be at her side, he will, he must, she trusts him and so he must trust in her, he must, he _must_.

He must.

The light of day is golden in the room by the time he rises once again from bed to don the clothes of Lord Protector. He dresses, quietly. He can hear the tower stirring around them. Beginning to wake. They have no time at all – and the long time of not having each other stretches before them, laid out in a map over the sea.

He will return, Corvo thinks fiercely. He will return and the news will be good and she will be safe. The tides cycle back. It is the way of things. He turns back the sleeves of his shirt with a motion that is almost violent, creasing the fabric blade-sharp.

There is a rustle behind him.

“You need this,” says Jessamine, and he feels his coat drape over his shoulders. And against his will (again) Corvo turns – and she is standing there before him in nothing but the morning light; and he is already uniformed and masked, already far away.


End file.
